Benghazigate produces a whiff of tyranny

In our posts about Benghazigate, we have focused on (1) the failure of the Obama administration to provide needed (and requested) security in Benghazi, (2) the Obama administration’s refusal to call for military assistance when our personnel were under deadly attack, and (3) the adminstration’s unwillingness to speak honestly about the attack in the days following it and, it appears, even until this day.

Bill Otis identifies a fourth issue, albeit one that’s related to the third: the Department of Justice’s persecution of the producer of an internet video that offends Muslims. The persecution consists of charging the producer with a probabtion violation.

Based on his decades of service as a federal prosecutor, Bill tells me that that probation violators routinely get a pass on violations far more serious and suggestive of renewed criminality than making a perfectly legal (and, some would think, First Amendment-protected) video. But the producer of this particular video was hustled off to the slammer in no time.

The government’s motive is not difficult to discern. As Bill explains, Team Obama wanted to maintain, and embellish upon, its campaign narrative that anti-American terrorists have been largely vanquished, and that the attack Benghazi was not terrorism, but rather a spontaneous response to an internet video mocking Islam. Hence, the use of our criminal justice system to imprison the producer of the video on the pretext of violating the terms of his probation, which included an agreement not to use the internet for five years without approval from his probation officer.

In any other context, the imprisonment of a non-violent probationer for exercising his right to make a non-pornographic internet video would have leftists screaming about tyranny. In most instances this howling would be baseless. But where, as here, the motive for jailing the probationer is so transparently political, the word tyranny does come to mind.